After school English camp

Success! Last week there was an afterschool English. Four English teachers were involved and we all made our own classes. I made a volcano lesson, and also co-taught a soap making lesson. I also made questions for the "golden bell" quiz. (Questions like "I keep you dry when it is raining. What am I? Dry means NOT WET"). When there were too many winners, I had to make a hard question to find the grand winner. Spelling "squirrel" turned out to be TOO difficult, oops! The final question ended up being "I am an animal. I live in the ocean. I have ten legs. What am I?" We gave it to the girl who wrote Squeid.

Anyways the class was a lot of fun. The kids seemed surprised by the hands-on aspect of it. I told them to remove rings and bracelets, and they were so apprehensive at first. Once they starting playing with the dough, however, they really enjoyed it. I think they don't get to play with ucky mucky stuff that often. Another teacher had a sandwich making class which was the most popular and I mean, duh. Sandwiches are awesome.

Anyway here is photographic proof that I teach these cuties. Cuter photos where their faces are visible are on facebook!

Golden Bell quiz game. They oddly loved it.

Volcano lesson

Soap lesson

My masterful worksheet. Was nice that they all seemed
to get the vocab fairly quickly.

Running low on my tea stash

Despite being a major exporter of green tea (ok I just made that up I have no idea), Korea hasn't really wowed me with tea. I am able to buy my favourite black tea, Twinnings Early Grey, online. However, sometimes I long for a delicious caffeine free option that isn't a super mild flower.

Friends and family of Canada - if you're feeling generous these days, I would LOVE a shipment of DavidsTea!

My favourites are
Goji Pop
Coco chai rooibos
Jessie's Tea
and
The Glow


I love you anyways, but if you were thinking of sending a package ANYWAYS.. you get the point ;)

Here are some beautiful roses. They're all over my neighbourhood these days and really brighten things up.

Boseong Green Tea Fields

Alright and on to the main event! Boseong Green Tea Fields!! We woke up early, left Yulpo, and made out way (via and amusing bus ride) back to Boseong. There is currently a festival going on at the fields. We have come to realize that most festivals include similar things: a cropping up of tents of various people telling things. Some things will be specific to the festival, for example many here were selling tea or tea holding pottery, but then also just stand festival tents like food, weird toys, carnival type games, etc, will always pop up. We enjoyed some free tea tastings, and admire the beautiful pottery before going up to the actual tea fields.

The fields were very interesting! I had always imagined tea to be a plant with huge, lush leaves, and not very woody. Actually, they were extremely woody and hard, with only little leaves. Surely the leaves will get bigger, but it was still a surprise! The air smelled unebelievably fresh, and there were huge pine trees all around us. Jeolla province was definitely a lush and beauiful area. The main city, Gwangju, was also incredibly beautiful and had Western type luxuries.. like trees and benches and sidewalks in the city!  But I digress, the tea! It was very cool. We also got to eat a lot of green tea products, my favourite being the green tea frozen yogurt. Yummy.We also got lucky with a day that wasn't too hot, since a lot of the day was spent hiking up the fields. It kind of blows my mind that so many tourists are allowed into the actual green tea fields. I was amused that the bush I had accidentally fallen into may be the same bush that flavoured my frozen yogurt!

Standard festival tent: big ol pot of something

Weird horse toys

Terrifying baby mannequins

This was cool! You could
buy lotus plant leaves
and grow them in a big
bowl of water!

Green tea selling booth. The picture of the woman farming
really makes me sad. It must be so awful manually
harvesting leaves!!! 

Traditional Korean paper, or fabirc?
I think it might be Hanji.

Pretty pottery

It is common practice in Korea for fast food places to have
plastic imitations of their dishes. I don't know if this is
supposed to whet the appetite of patrons, but it has
been extremely useful for us. Anyways here is a plastic
representation of a tasty plate-o-whale.

Cute little gazebo.

We avoided the crowded festival food tents, and instead
ate at the little restaurant that served green tea noodles!

Ice cream!

|Funny tree

And finally, the actual green tea fields! So lush, so lovely.

As Adri took this photo, some Korean ladies behind her
kept saying how cute it was in Korean. Cute is one
of the few words I know, so I laughed and thanked them.
Gave them a shock I bet!

The majority of tourists were Korean. It's nice to see how
they love to visit their own country.

Yulpo Beach

Happy Buddha's Birthday! This weekend was a long weekend in Korea celebrating, you guessed it, the birth of Buddha. It was for this holiday that there have been lanterns decorated the streets. While we were told that temples did give out free portion of bibimbap this weekend, my friends and I decided to use the long weekend to journey across Korea. I traveled with Adri and our friend Samantha. 

Gyeongju is located on the South Eastern side of Korea (Fig. 1). Boseong, the green tea fields, are down in the South Western tip in South Jeolla Province. Because it is so far, we decided to stay overnight. Boseong, the actual Green Field town, doesn't have much going on in it and we had trouble finding a room, so we ended up staying about 20 minutes out in a seaside village called Yulpo. Finding a room was an adventure in itself, and I had to ask my lovely coteacher to call and make reservations for us. Many places were booked up, but luckily we finally found a room. I couldn't understand most of the conversation on the phone, but I heard her use the word for "foreigners" a lot, so I was glad the pension owner was warned of our arrival. The place we stayed at is called a "minbak" which is a small place offering simple rooms. It was just what we needed. The owner tried in vain to talk to us a lot, but of course we never got very far. Anyway,  we had to take 3 buses to get there and got caught up in major traffic, causing our journey to take a very very long time. Despite an early start in the day , we arrived around 7pm and  were extremely happy to have a room and kind woman waiting for us.

Yulpo was an absolutely tiny town, I can't even find it on Wikipedia. It reminded me a lot of little tiny maritime towns I had done some Oceanography field work in.. not much around but a few boats and a lot of fishing. It was amazing to breathe such fresh clean air. We ate at a seafood restaurant where the specialty was raw fish.. but the steep price of that made us wary. We ended up getting as mystery soup chosen by our patient waitress.  We didn't do much other than eat dinner and go to bed to rest up for our next day's adventure.

(Although we did entertain the local children. We were even more rare there than in Gyeongju, and one boy in particular loved screaming HELLO at us and I AM CRAZY. Good times)

The following morning, using a ton of broken information, we managed to catch a bus from Yulpo up to Boseong. On the bus was only us and three older ladies who were travelling together. We were only able to communicate very slightly, saying where we were from, where we lived in Korea, and that we were English teachers. This tiny interaction impressed them a lot, and they nodded in great approval of us.

Figure 1. Map of Korea highlighting the locations
of Gyeongju and Boseong/Yulpo.

Crazy looking guy with a metal detector.

If you look carefully you can see tunicates!

Dried anchovies is one of my favourite side dishes here.
Not only are they delicious, but I can pretend
I am a giant crunching down on bones.

Mystery soup. Was quite mild, almost bland even.
Involved a lot of molluscs and radishes.

Mystery ingredient we weren't brave enough to try.
Adri did and said incredibly chewy.

Outside of seafood restaurants are tanks so you can
become acquainted with dinner beforehand.
Most are full of fish, but some have mysterious animals.
This floating things have a remarkable resemblance
to a certain part of human anatomy. 

Teacher's Day

Yesterday as I was walking to school I found myself walking next to a particularly adorable grade 4 student. I said hello, and she said hello back, but then she began to giggle uncontrollably. I asked why she was laughing, and she managed to say "sunglasses!" between guffaws. Needless to say, it was incredibly cute.

Next I arrived at school in my grade 6 English classroom. This is where my desk is and so it's my home base. A grade 5 student came into the class, highly unusual. She called me over and proceeded to give me a paper corsage. I was then told that the following day, Wednesday (aka today), was teacher day, but since the kids would have no classes on Wednesday, we would get tokens on Tuesday. So she had bravely found her way to my room just to give it to me! I name many students in my head since I don't know their Korean names. She is "Braces" for obvious reasons. I had no idea Braces liked me so much! What a cutie.

Next I had my first class. While I was fiddling around on the computer, then said "Teacher! Come here!" and pointed to the front of the room. I walked over, and then suddenly they all got up, walked to the front of the room, bowed so low they were one the floor, and in unison said "Thank you teacher!!" I almost died. I thanked them back, saying how lucky I was to have such amazing students, and hoped they would understand my sincerity.. and I think they did! I was later given a letter from a girl in that class that said the following:

 "Maybe you were very surprised by our surprised bow! You loved it? I think it was quite fine! I'm really happy! Because you are my teacher and teach us very fun and happy play games. Your jokes I really love your everything. I want to meet you after I graduate. U kuje ti send you mail very often. Will you like it? Happy teacher's days!"

I died. I got another from the same class that said "Teacher is everything perfect." Can't really top that now can we?

My other classes were much more normal, once even included some drama that made a girl cry (I never know what's happening) but it was still pretty magical. I got a few more little gifts at lunch time, including a bouquet from a class!

Today, Wednesday, was actual teacher's day. There were no classes, and instead I went to a big interscholastic teacher's sports day! There was a yunnori tournament indoors and a volleyball tournament outside. I must admit yunnori was super confusing, but still amusing to watch.

Not  being on any teams, my day consisted of marathon eating. I really think I might explode. SO much food!!! After a delicious picnic brunch of some kind of fatty pig meat (I thought it was trotters, but was told it wasn't this time. Something about meat from the bone? Who knows..), we went to a traditional Korean place for lunch. Lunch was never ending and none of the food was particularly yummy for me (I love Korean food.. but cold pickled stuff and raw fish are boring and not very savory to my pallet) but did include some super strange looking frilly... mushrooms? I really couldn't tell you. Some kind of non animal frilly things that kind of tasted like coffee! I ate a bunch, and as I'm less shy than I was, didn't even attempt to tackle the massive pile of rice I was given.

 Afterwards we went back to watch our men's volleyball team in semi finals. It was SO exciting, I really wanted them to win. They all looked very dashing in their uniforms. I almost melted away in  the heat in my very modest covering outfit, but I stuck it through and stood in the sun to cheer our guys on. Sadly, they lost their second set 11-15, and then game was over. Bummer.

An amusing interaction was when a woman who I don't recognize me sat next to me and said "N, you are good girl. Good girl."(The way Koreans with limited English pronounce my name sounds like N). It was very confusing. But I think maybe my decision to stay and watch the volleyball game made people happy? I never know!!

Throwing amusingly, and I believe
purposely, awkward yunnori logs.
I just cheered when others did.

Lunch.. about 10 other courses were added throughout
the meal.

What are these! I have no idea. I was sitting far from
anyone who could speak English. So crazy looking!
The brown one tasted like coffee, and the white tasted like..
hmm.. nothing really. Chewiness. 

Raw fish. Wish bones in it. Meh.

Sweltering volleyball game. I couldn't help
but wonder if the Koreans' heads were super
hot from their jet black hair. Most people wore
pants, hats, and jackets, to hide from the sun.
In capri leggings, a light dress, and a
light cardi to cover my shoulders,
I literally almost melted. Koreans are
so heat resistant!!